Wiki Community/March 2008 Wiki Meeting

Date: March 30, 2008
Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM
Location: Jitters Cafe
Attendance: RobertPolyn, StevenDibelius, PeteB, DaveMahon, JoannaLicata, Michelina's business owners
Next Meeting: Sunday, April 27, 2008. 4pm at Jitter's unless otherwise agreed upon by the Google Group.

The first business item was MissGia's comment on Michelina's Italian Eatery. RobertPolyn, the rocwiki.org domain owner, inquired what the wiki could do to ameliorate the situation. Robert and Michelina's owners agreed to redact MissGia's revised comment based on a lack of supporting evidence and their provision of additional back story. MissGia, who was explicitly invited to the meeting by PeteB, is invited to contact RobertPolyn directly if she wishes to have this decision reversed/modified by providing supporting evidence for her claims.

The owners were satisfied with this decision and repeated their offer to host future RocWiki events. When Peter expressed concern about recent comment deletions by BuisManag and JohnLance, they explained that they believed that John is a regular customer of theirs, but is otherwise unaffiliated. Peter explained that comment deletions are only to be done under extreme cases¹. They agreed to honor this standard and to communicate this to John. As such, BuisManag was unbanned. JohnLance's ban is still extent, pending confirmation of his identity.

* 3/31 Addition: BusiManag account was deleted as a result of the agreements come to in the meeting. PeteB

At this point, the Michelina's partners left the meeting and Robert discussed the future of RocWiki.

He is renewing the push for switching wiki engines to Trac, and asked about our concerns regarding the current site and functionality requests for the revised site.

Overwhelmingly, concerns were expressed about the commenting system:

• Disclaimers need to be clearly provided - StevenDibelius
  

• They need to be on distinct pages from their corresponding topics - JoannaLicata
  

• They need to be in reverse chronological order - Pete, JoannaLicata
  

• Direct instructions for relaying concerns need to be clearly posted - DaveMahon
  

• Comments need to be filterable by visitors - RobertPolyn

RobertPolyn added that he would like to see a "splash page" for newly registered users which would provide a brief introduction the underlying concepts of RocWiki. He concurred with DaveMahon's suggestion that registration should require a confirmed e-mail address.

DaveMahon requested stronger templates to make well-formatted entries easier for contributors. StevenDibelius noted that many new contributors in particular seem to have issues with this. RobertPolyn approved of the idea of having fields in the templates, but asked about implementation. While restaurants are fairly easy to standardize, not-for-profits have different needs, so categorization may cause problems, particularly, as StevenDibelius pointed out, for pages that straddle categories.

RobertPolyn also reiterated - and the attending group concurred - that while RocWiki does not have and should not implement a rigid policy structure, the meetings do function as a decision making body and that decisions made in regularly scheduled wiki meetings need to be respected. Anyone interested in contributing to the decision making process needs to actively contribute to the Google Group and attend wiki meetings. It was further reiterated, by DaveMahon, that members of the AdminGroup cannot consider themselves as anything but equals among the other contributors.

The other major improvement RobertPolyn expressed a desire to see is static layout with dynamic content, which would provide greater stability to the site, as well as customizability for visitors. DaveMahon requested WYSIWYG editing and RobertPolyn confirmed that Trac does have this feature.

Contributions of content are, as always, encouraged from all visitors. In particular, it would be great if more non-restaurant-related content could be added though.

Robert asked for additional assistance in making the transition to the new engine. When it comes time to make the jump, much of the changeover will be automated, but much editing by hand will still be required, which calls for a Wiki Engine Switching Party.

In the short term, he will make the following changes to the wiki:

• Adding a forwarding e-mail address for concerns. It will forward the message to the Google Group
  

• A link to this e-mail address will be placed on every page
  

• The Comments macro will be revised to include instructions and disclaimers